


(Sol)lux et veritas

by violasarecool



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Aromantic Character, Deity Au, Gen, Nonbinary Character, the trolls are gods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 03:45:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13068423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violasarecool/pseuds/violasarecool
Summary: the god of doom pays a series of visits to their seer





	(Sol)lux et veritas

**Author's Note:**

> lux et veritas - latin for "light and truth"
> 
> both rose and sollux are aro & nb (rose is pangender, sollux doesn't really give a shit about gender). some irreverent mentions of sex à la Rose that don't indicate interest.
> 
> if these are a bit drabbley, its bc id originally planned on writing more. but since it's been in my wips since 2014, i figured id post what i have.

It was a simple thing to summon a god, easier than Rose had expected. One moment she was reading aloud words in that strange tongue she had learned to wrap her mouth around in the course of a few months; the next, there was an immense gust of wind that extinguished every candle in the room. She strained her eyes, peering around the room, but saw nothing.

"Did it work?" she wondered aloud.

"Uh, yeah?" a voice replied, and her head jerked up as the noise echoed around the empty temple.

She glanced around, but still saw nothing.

"I can take a corporeal form if that would make you more comfortable in the presence of my godly awesomeness."

"If you wouldn't mind."

"Cool. Close your eyes, then."

She closed her eyes obediently, ears straining to catch any noise, any hint of another being in her presence. She waited a few moments, but none came. "Are you there?" she finally asked.

"Well I don't normally appear with a crack of thunder and a smell like someone's pissed themself."

"How specific," she said, opening her eyes. Then giggled.

They stood, slouched, slender to the point of boniness, pale to the point of looking like they had some kind of disease—which was improbable, although who knew what kinds of diseases the incorporal were susceptible to. They peered at her from under a mop of dark hair that stuck out every which way, opened a mouthful of similarly untidy teeth. "What?" they demanded.

"I might have expected something a little more impressive from someone as all powerful as yourself," she said, supressing a smile.

They drew themself up. "I can do powerful." There was a sound like rushing wind, and it grew dark for a moment despite the natural light streaming in. When the darkness faded, an immense bear stood before her, claws long and pointed, teeth razor-sharp.

"Isn't a bear rather pedestrian for a god?" Rose asked.

The bear growled at her. "What do you want, a dragon?" Its form shifted, and then there was an enormous scaley creature standing so tall its head scraped the celing, its long snakelike body coiling around the room. A moment later, it disappeared, and the humanoid form returned, staring at Rose with gaunt eyes. "Dragons are boring," they said.

Rose inclined her head. "I suppose they are." She watched as the figure turned, and began to stroll around the room, trailing their hand along the walls with a disinterested expression. "Do you have a name?" she asked.

They rolled their eyes. "More than you can imagine with your pitiful brain. Sol is a pretty common one, though."

"Sol, meaning 'sun'?"

They turned to her with a smirk. "Long story. Basically, I made the mistake of appearing to some backwater colony for the first time right after a solar eclipse. So they're all like "oh shit, look at all that sunlight!" and like playing telephone it gets mutated to Sol, or sometimes Sollux. And like some kind of stupid joke the fuckers still sacrifice to me to keep the sun going."

"But you don't actually have any power over it, I gather."

They snorted. "Don't be ridiculous, your sun doesn't need any gods to keep it going, we wouldn't even know how." They paused. "Ok, maybe Aradia would, they know a lot about that shit. But it has absolutely fuckall to do with me, I just plant ideas in people's heads that usually correspond with what's going to happen in their limited lifespan."

"Prophecies."

"More or less." They glanced up, then chuckled, their lips drawn up in an unpleasant smile. "Usually pretty damn dark shit as well. It's almost a shame there's no one to see the irony in praying to the god of doom for light."

* * *

 Another day; this time no candles seeping wax onto the stone altars, the barest trickle of sunlight visible through dark curtains. Rose sat in the centre of the floor, a bundle of fabric in her lap as Sollux glanced her over appraisingly.

"You enchant a cloak with light refraction so you can pass more or less invisibly, and you use your knowledge of what traits people overlook to do the rest," Sollux said, with an expression Rose might have classified as _impressed_. "Pretty damn obvious I was going to be assigned to you."

"Assigned? I thought _I_ summoned _you_."

They waved a hand at her. "Kind of, but I was already supposed to be keeping an eye on you. I'm supposed to visit at some point, you just picked the time and place."

"I see." She contemplated them for a moment, considering this new information. "You were assigned to me by a superior... There's an organized, enforced hierarchy of gods, then?"

They scowled. "I wouldn't call it organized."

* * *

 "So you can transform yourself, and you can transform miscellaneous objects. Can you transform other people?"

"Well, yeah," they said, reclining lazily, stretched across the surface of the large altar in the centre of the room. "The whole smiting thing wouldn't be half as amusing without the possibility of at least turning them into a possum, or maybe a tree. I've used that a few times, makes for excellent tree graveyards."

"So you could transform me."

"Yeah, if you're shallow enough to want the looks of a braindead socialite," they said, sneering, but they looked vaguely... uncomfortable.

"If you know so much about me, why would you assume my preoccupation lay in _physicalities?"_ She leaned in slightly, eyebrows raised.

They rolled their eyes. "Yeah, yeah, physical shit, sex, clearly you've grasped the concept of innuendo. Weren't you paying attention to my impressive and terrifying entrance? If you hoped that comment would elicit some sort of embarassed reaction, a 'youthful blush'", they said, pitching their voice to imitate a small child's for a moment, "you've clearly forgotten how old I am."

"Odd; from the stories, I didn't imagine an immortal god would lose their sex drive."

Now they glared at her. "Let me guess: Zeus? Wow, I just _love_ the blatant and not slightly flattering allusion to his obsessive, psychopathic actions that somehow usually get excused as his fucking 'sex drive'."

"Does he exist, then?" Rose asked.

They ignored her, settling into a sitting position a few feet above the ground.

_Putting them in a position above me. Inferiority complex disguised by arrogant shows of power?_ Rose wondered.

"Technically," Sollux said, catching Rose's attention once more, "we're not immortal. Not in the sense you're thinking."

She rested her chin on her hand, appraising their face. "So the 'puny mortal' shtick was a bluff?"

They waved a hand. "Hyperbole, and works on scaring off the more impressionable. No, I'm not an invincible, all-knowing creator who could outlive the multiverse itself, if that's what you're asking. But I'm still infinitely more fucking awesome than you are, like, there aren't a lot of ways of killing me, and I have a much longer lifespan than you." They paused, and she opened her mouth to say something, but they held up a finger, adding: "Oh, and we're also a lot smarter than you."

"I suppose age grants all kinds of immeasurable experience and knowledge," she said dryly. "But when you said—"

"Yeah, but our brains are also way more capable," they said, cutting her off. "Like, Aristotle, remember that little shit? You study him all the time, idolize him, and yet out of the three times I had to deal with him, we spent like ninety percent of the time arguing about weird ideas he pulled out of his ass. I mean," they brushed their hair out of their eyes with one hand, "ok, yeah, I guess he was halfway decent for some guy in a civilisation just figuring out ways to dispose of their shit, and I mean that in the most literal way possible, but _come on_ , the guy called poetry _science."_

"Touché," Rose said.

* * *

"Ugh." Sollux sat hunched on the cold stone temple floor, all pretense of superior godliness long gone. Candles flickered on the altar, burning low. Weeks of bickering disguised as debates, discussion turned increasingly intimate sharing of knowledge, soon to be over. One last night in that cold, empty temple.

Sollux stared at her, chin propped up on one hand, brows low. "I should have just slept with you when I had the chance."

Rose tipped her head, surprised. "Are you making a confession?"

"What?" Their nose crinkled as they made a face at her. "No, _no,_ shut the fuck up, I'm trying to be sentimental here, give me a break." She smiled, but didn't say anything, and they shrugged. "Sex makes people, humans, boring. Well, gods too, but after a few hundred years they think up new ways to fuck with you." They paused. "And new ways of fucking you, I guess, but that doesn't make them any more interesting, just persistant."

Rose laughed quietly, and Sollux frowned. "What I'm trying to say is... I guess I'm glad I met you."

"You won't be visiting after this then," she said.

A flicker of annoyance passed across their face. "What, you couldn't just say you were glad to meet me too? No of course I'm not allowed to visit you again after this, if gods visited mortals on their own terms who knows what would fucking happen, most of them are stone cold idiots. ...And by them I mean the gods."

She smiled, against her will. "I'll miss your snarky remarks."

"You'd better damn well treasure them, you're not likely to get any of the same calibre around here."

"No," Rose agreed, watching as they began to fade. "Likely not."


End file.
